As is known, a tyre tread has to meet a large number of often conflicting technical requirements, including a low rolling resistance, a high wear resistance and a high grip on both the dry road and the wet road.
These compromises in properties, in particular from the viewpoint of the rolling resistance and the wear resistance, were able to be improved in recent years with regard to energy-saving “Green Tyres”, intended in particular for passenger vehicles, by virtue of the use of novel weakly hysteretic rubber compositions having the characteristic of being reinforced predominantly by specific inorganic fillers described as reinforcing, in particular by highly dispersible silicas (HDSs), capable of rivalling, from the viewpoint of the reinforcing power, conventional tyre-grade carbon blacks.
Thus, today, these reinforcing inorganic fillers are gradually replacing carbon blacks in tyre treads, all the more so as they have another known virtue, that of increasing the grip of tyres on wet, snowy or icy roads.
It is known in particular to use thermoplastic elastomers (TPEs) in rubber compositions intended in particular for tyre tread applications. The use of such elastomers makes it possible in particular to improve certain usage properties of the tyre, in particular the grip, rolling resistance and abrasion resistance performances.